Steve Howell <showell30 at yahoo.com> writes:
>>http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.10.4/html/users_guide/syntax-extns.html...>> might be of interest. Maybe Ruby and/or Python could grow something similar.
> Can you elaborate?
List comprehensions are a Python feature you're probably familiar with,
and I think Ruby has something like them too. They originally came from
Haskell. GHC (the main Haskell implementation) now supports an extended
list comprehension syntax with SQL-like features. I haven't used it
much yet, but here's an example from a poker ranking program
(http://www.rubyquiz.com/quiz24.html) that I did as a Haskell exercise:
let (winners:others) =
[zip c ls | ls <- lines cs
, let {h = mkHand ls; c=classify h}
, then group by c
, then sortWith by Down c]
It's reasonably evocative and doing the same thing with the older
syntax would have been a big mess. "Down" basically means sort
in reverse order.